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The Tide is High is a new body of work by Megan Cope that
continues her practice of reclaiming Australia’s geographical places.

In
particular, the exhibition looks into the connection between land and
resources and the conflict that this connection causes. Victoria’s gold
rush towns – Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong – are represented here in
vintage military maps. Cope decolonizes these towns by including the
names of the Aboriginal groups and languages to which these areas
originally belonged and still belong today; a superimposed 5-metre sea
level rise renders the colonial grip on the places even more tenuous.

The Tide is High
also features a collection of protest placards that reference the
current anxieties about asylum seekers. White Australia’s fear of losing
its “jobs, land and wealth” to refugees, Cope suggests, is symptomatic of
the cultural amnesia that fails to consider the Aboriginal people whose
jobs, land and wealth were already sacrificed.

Para Site proudly presents A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear,
ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story - curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero.

Starting from the
events that affected Hong Kong in the spring of 2003, the exhibition
traces the different narratives, historical backgrounds as well as the
implications of these events in relation to the contemporary culture and
politics of Hong Kong and the world.
The city has a subjectively internalised history of epidemics and of
representations in the colonial era as an infected land that needed to
be conquered from nature, disease and oriental habits in order to be
made healthy, modern and profitable. These narratives culminated with
the identification of the bacillus causing the plague during an epidemic
in Hong Kong in 1894, in Para Site's current neighbourhood. This
discovery contributed to a dubious association of the disease with Asia
and heightened the "yellow peril" scares in Europe and America at the
time. In Hong Kong, the fear of infecting agents has always resonated
with a fear of other people, quarantine has mirrored exclusion, whilst
epidemiological, racial and cultural contamination have shared the same
language.
When the city became the epicenter of the most significant airborne
epidemic in recent years - the SARS crisis of 2003 - the unparalleled
shutdown of the city and the atomisation of society in quarantined
segments led to an unexpected shift in the political awareness of the
Hong Kong citizenry. Just after the end of the epidemic, record numbers
of people turned out to protest against a new internal security law
imposed by Beijing, causing its shelving and, more importantly, the
emergence of an active political community. After that moment, the image
of a de-politicised and soullessly pragmatic commercial hub could not
anymore tell the whole story about Hong Kong.

Less gloriously however, the main measure taken to alleviate the
economic meltdown caused by SARS, the option for Mainland citizens to
visit the territory for the first time on individual visas caused
another major shift in the identity of the city, and its relationship to
Mainland China. Medicalised vocabularies and imageries reminiscent of
epidemics have been used in regard to the growing number of Mainland
Chinese in Hong Kong, seen as pathogens corrupting an otherwise healthy
social body and as milk formula sucking locusts. Again, an epidemic
becomes the backdrop of paranoia and hate, but the fear of the Chinese,
of their vast numbers and uncivilized habits, is now harboured by fellow
Chinese rather than by the self-content Europeans of the last plague
visitation a century ago. This essentialising xenophobia has come to be a
defining factor in the relationship between the two sides of the
Shenzhen River, and paradoxically has complicated the pro-democracy (and
anti-Beijing) discourse and activism, rejuvenated in the wake of the
SARS crisis.

These ambivalences in the identity of Hongkongers are reflected in
the figure of Leslie Cheung, the hugely iconic figure, actor and singer
who committed suicide at the height of the SARS crisis by jumping off
the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in Central Hong Kong. His shocking death at
the darkest hour of the darkest times in recent memory played its part
in the mobilisation of Hongkongers, who turned out in huge numbers for
Leslie's funeral, ignoring the health warnings in effect at the time.
Gor Gor's ("Big Brother" in Cantonese - as Leslie has been known) life
and career have contributed to forging a strong sense of identity for
Hong Kong culture, in spite of his queer and often contrarian persona.
The versatility of the roles he played reflected (and arguably enhanced)
the versatility of the city's identity over the past decades, before
and after the handover. And his ghostly presence continues to do so.

The exhibition aims to navigate through these disparate though
interconnected narratives and to contribute to a critical discussion
about Hong Kong's recent history with the help of works by local and
international artists, as well as of pop cultural artifacts and archival
documents. It is curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero.

Para Site Art Space is financially supported by Springboard Grant
under the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme of the Government of
the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The content of this programme does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

This was a panel conversation with the topic of
Just who is black enough?
Panel: Dr Anita Hiess, Dr Chelsea Bond, Kevin O'Brien and Megan Cope.

Author
of Am I Black Enough? Dr Anita Heiss; University of Queensland Senior
Lecturer with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit Dr
Chelsea Bond; Queensland University of Technology Professor of Design,
School of Design, Creative Industries Faculty Kevin O'Brien; and artist
Megan Cope explore the deep and complex issues around the process of
being deemed 'black enough' through the politics of self determination
and ancestry.
The panel was chaired by Rhoda Roberts

Clancestry is a celebration of country. This means many things.
"Country" acknowledges the Traditional Owners of this land. As a
metaphor it connects
us to our homeland and regions with a special character. From a
performing arts perspective it is both an art form and a popular
performance genre. Clancestry is a festival celebrating the arts
and cultural practices of the world's First Nation's Peoples. The
festival draws on rich spiritual culture and provides a space to connect
with other clan groups across the country and the globe. In presenting
performances, workshops, free events and conversations the festival
moves beyond transactional contact into deeper relationships between all peoples.

Whooo hooo! I got selected to participate in Kickstart 2013 to produce work for Next Wave 2014.
There are some really fantastic artists in this years program including 6 blackfellas working in theater, performance and visual arts...

For this exhibition I made a video work on Wurundjeri & Boon Wurrung Country.
Toponymic Interventions #1 (Kulin Nation) (10:00mins) is an extension of my current mapping practices and seeks to challenge ordinary Australians ideas of ownership particularly in the urban environment. By projecting Aboriginal place names and also language groups onto built and natural surfaces in sites significant to Aboriginal people these works decolonise the familiar and present a duality of space, cultural connections and our sense of time.